Posted on 05/31/2015 4:25:19 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Can we all stop pretending that there’s any real suspense in this presidential race?
As the children’s book says: Voters, it’s time to “Go the [expletive] to sleep.” You can turn off Fox, MSNBC, and CNN; you can close Twitter; you can sign off your crazy uncle’s Facebook feed.
I am going to tell you, right now, what the political landscape of the future looks like so you don’t waste your time over the next year listening to a parade of pundits or watching those ridiculous primary debates. The 2016 election is going to come down to Hillary vs. Jeb, of course. Dynasty against dynasty. The campaign that would horrify our Founding Fathers and will bore everyone to tears.
How will this happen?
That Hillary will coast I doubt surprises you. Sure, has her B-list challengers stoking the populist embers in the Democratic base. Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley are in. Lincoln Chafee and Jim Webb may soon follow suit. Each may put up a good fight, raise some decent money and earn a moment in the sun. Collectively, they will force Hillary to finesse sticky issues that pit the Democratic Party’s working class against its donor class. But they won’t fundamentally alter the trajectory of the race. After all, you don’t really think she is going to make herself a fat target and campaign from inside the Goldman Sachs boardroom do you?
For example, while others demand restoring FDR’s Glass-Steagall regulations and breaking up the big banks, she will blur the issue by proposing something like her own tidy package of incredibly wonky banking regulations. They may call them small-bore; she will say she is looking forward and not backward. In the blizzard of policy details, most voters won’t understand what the candidates are talking about, but they will nevertheless walk away thinking Hillary knows what she’s talking about. That will be good enough.
What about the emails? The foreign Clinton Foundation donors? Won’t anything else unnerving turn up? Oh, we’ll have our little media frenzies. The emails she did turn over to the State Department are already drip-drip-dripping out. She may well testify again to the House Benghazi committee. But as we’ve seen with the “Clinton Cash” book release, these kerfuffles mainly serve to whip up Republican froth. Meanwhile Democratic voters are experiencing Clinton Fatigue Fatigue. Comforted by the notion that Clintons know how to shake it off, they’ll do the same.
Might Hillary’s old Iraq vote give a challenger the same opening Barack Obama took to paint her as excessively hawkish? No, because the foreign policy debates of today are not deeply dividing the left. Consider that the most pacifistic of the left have long complained about the president’s use of drones and government surveillance, yet Obama enjoys near unanimous approval among Democrats. Obama has even edged into Syria, as the rise of ISIS brought him closer to Clinton’s earlier position in favor of a more robust military role. There’s no position that Clinton currently holds that makes her vulnerable.
You are probably more shocked that Jeb will have it so easy. He starts off as such a weak frontrunner. He’s mired in a five-way tie for first place nationally, at a piddling 10 percent, in the most recent Quinnipiac Republican primary poll. He’s in a virtual four-way tie in New Hampshire. He doesn’t even amount to the frontrunner in Iowa. And he will face a 2016 conservative field at least a step up from the 2012 clown show. Is there no one who could pick up a head of steam and best Bush mano-a-mano?
Pundits have concocted pat scenarios in which an insurgent could dethrone the scion. All Ted Cruz has to do is unite the Tea Party with the social conservatives. All Marco Rubio had to do is unite the Tea Party with the Establishment. All Rand Paul had to do is attract libertarians who haven’t been Republican activists. Heck, earlier this year, yours truly floated that all Scott Walker has to do is unite the conservative opinion leaders with the conservative grassroots to leap ahead of Bush.
None of that will happen. The Republican Party is just too splintered and too fractionalized. And any conservative consolidation project is severely hampered by the bottomless pit of Republican candidates. Last week we were blessed with Rick Santorum and George Pataki. Lindsey Graham and Rick Perry are expected to jump in this week. I can’t believe I’m saying this out loud, but it really looks like Donald Trump won’t be far behind.
Each of these hopefuls may be more implausible than the next. But the more candidates that can claim their own chunk of the conservative base—Santorum’s blue-collar social conservatives, Graham’s hard-core hawks, Trump’s angry rich guys who dole out “wife bonuses”—the harder it is for conservatives to pool their resources.
And if there’s one thing Jeb Bush will have that the rest of the field won’t, it is resources. His latest round of “I haven’t made a final decision" coyness is just so can he legally milk every last dollar from the Bush family’s vast donor network for his Right to Rise Super PAC before he becomes an official candidate and canvasses his rich friends all over again for direct donations.
Furthermore, no issues in the 2015 pipeline are conducive to bringing conservatives together. The landscape is littered with land mines, like the recent ill-fated push for state “religious freedom” laws. The incessant and irritating Senate floor grandstanding by Sen. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, some of which we’re watching unfold right now, is just the warm-up to the inevitable spending bill compromises between Republican congressional leaders and President Obama to keep the government open, raise the debt ceiling, pay for the Highway Trust Fund and keep the Export-Import Bank. All this will conspire to make conservatives as divided as ever, tripping up Republican candidates right and … right.
Presidential candidates in the Senate will become the face of Washington dysfunction, while upstart governors, so new to the presidential stage, will lack the finesse to slam Washington without ticking off conservatives spoiling for more fights.
What about Gov. Scott Walker? When I talked him up in February, he was fresh off his strong performance in one of the first Iowa cattle calls, and even today he holds a precarious first-place position in Iowa polls. But his quick rise was blunted by a series of wobbly moments: saying he was ready for ISIS because he fought unions, inelegantly dodging a question about evolution and redefining the meaning of “flip-flop” to exempt any utterance made by a non-legislator.
In a vacuum, each individual gaffe is not fatal. But when you’re trying to scrounge up enough cash to avoided being drowned by the Bush machine, such mistakes keep donors from betting it all on you. I’m not being theoretical; the Koch brothers have signaled that Walker is their personal favorite, yet their plan is to spread their money around several candidates.
Bush may not entirely dazzle either. He won’t coast quite like Hillary. Just like in 2012, several in the GOP pack will get their 15 minutes as frontrunner—we’ll probably have a day when even Ben Carson looks serious. A debate quip here, a poor straw poll finish there, and boom, suddenly there will be “AmBushed” headlines and hashtags galore. But once the new leaders take their turns being hazed by the media, questions will be raised anew whether they were ready for their close-up—and conservative voters will flinch. Lacking a strong challenger that can consolidate the Right, Bush’s steadiness will be sufficient to hold on to his Establishment support and his fat war chest, helping him outlast the pack just like Mitt Romney, John McCain and Bob Dole.
Once the two political heirs clinched their respective nominations, the wailing will begin: Bush versus Clinton. Again. Can’t we find anybody else?
Fear not. That is when the real fun begins.
Hillary will no longer be just talking to Democratic primary voters, so how much daylight will she put between herself and President Obama, and on what issues? And the presence of Tea Party-types like Cruz will pull Jeb and everyone else rightward throughout the campaign. Will Jeb be able to pivot back, or will he be weighed down by some of his more right-wing remarks in the primary, as Romney was four years ago?
Both nominees have it in them to scramble toward the proverbial center. Yet their pedigrees—along with the backdrop of President Obama’s firmly left-of-center record, which is constantly injected into the campaign—make it impossible to replicate the Bush v. Gore 2000 festival of poll-tested rhetorical mush (the super boring presidential race itself, not the gripping Bush v. Gore post-election legal drama). They will have to duke it out over ideology.
Neither candidate can simply lean on their name. Hillary can’t blithely point to Bill’s record of job growth to explain how she would tackle this decade’s seemingly intractable challenges of flat wages, crushing student debt and runaway global carbon emissions. Jeb has the unprecedented challenge of producing ideas that persuade the public he isn’t going to repeat his brother’s mistakes, be it with the domestic economy or with foreign relations.
Couldn’t we find anyone else? We could! We will choose not to.
We want it this way: a bona fide heavyweight bout. Two veterans who need to prove they can strike out on their own. Hillary out for redemption after the bitter 2008 loss and the humiliations from her time in the East Wing. Jeb determined to show he’d be the best Bush of them all, restoring the luster to the family name.
Beyond the personal drama, deep down we also know that by passing on the less tested insurgents, in favor of a final contest between the wonkier and less folksy representatives of long-standing political families, we will avoid electing anyone for commander-in-chief that would drive the nation off the cliff. Or so we hope.
So relax, political junkies of 2015. Forget about pressuring your family to spend winter vacation in New Hampshire. Un-follow all those official campaign Twitter feeds. Turn off the push notifications on your new Apple Watch. Take that week off in December so you can sleep in the street waiting to get into Star Wars: The Force Awakens, if you really insist. You won’t need to watch the presidential wannabes on C-SPAN freezing in the Iowa snow.
We all know how this show is going to end. Anyone who says they don’t is just fooling themselves.
****
Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.
Ping!
What if they gave an election and nobody came?
I pray that the country is sick of both Clintons and Bushes.
My reaction: Ho, Hum.
If those two ran and won, I’m moving to Bora Bora. Seriously.
Yeah.....
.......NO.
Dims want O’Malley
The dumbing down of America is complete.
Mr Scher is an alum of Air America and it appears that he continues to bet on the wrong horses. Jeb is not going to be the GOP Candidate!
2008 all over again if it is.
I don't care who the party elites try to force on us, Ted Cruz is still my candidate and I'm voting for him. I will write in his name if I have to. I am not a slave of the Republican party.
If it urns out to be Jeb vs Hillary, it’ll be the lowest turnout ever.
Nobody likes either one.
What if they gave an election and nobody came?
Hillary! or Jeb...no matter who is chosen; Team Satan wins!
OK, but what about the REPUBLICAN convention?
Bill Scher is a first-class moron.
Wrong. Wrong.
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